Go on a journey with reading maps

Today, my former colleague and always friend Lora and I are giving a poster session at OPLA's RA in a day workshop. For regular blog readers, the following may or may not be as utterly thrilling to you as it is to us. For those of you driven here by links on our take-away bookmarks, welcome! Here are some more links and some further information about maps. Lora and I hope that you enjoyed talking with us, and that you are inspired to create your own "take" on the map idea. If you do, please share your maps with me via email (top L of this page)!

Our starting point for the presentation was a presentation at PLA 2006 entitled Readers' Maps: Blending Fiction and Nonfiction Readers' Advisory Through Reading Itineraries. It was presented by Nancy Pearl, Cathleen Towey, and Neal Wyatt. It outlined the idea of a map as a marketing tool for a specific book that defied "read-alikes." The map would "chart the themes or associations in a book," and act as a whole collection readers' advisory tool, tracing links from the chosen book to items in various library collections.

Ann Moffat, former Director of the Westmount Public Library (and shouted out to before on this blog), took this idea home to the greater Montreal library community, and formed a committee of local librarians to come up with a reading map template.

Various libraries produced some reading maps that year, and as I travelled to Ottawa I brought the idea here and developed a few more reading maps at Ottawa Public Library. Here are some links so you can peruse the examples of maps available online:

• Neal Wyatt's reading maps


• 
  Westmount Public Library - Reading maps


• My Flickr reading map


• Late-breaking news: a new map designed by Christine, a student in Dominican University’s GSLIS program, about the Sookie Stackhouse series! Seen via which also led to checking out the archive of Becky's students' maps here. Haven't seen them all yet, but some neat stuff!


• Maureen O'Connor - Reading Paths Wiki


• The Book of Negroes reading map - OLA's Super Conference 2009 One book, one conference selection


• Exploring The Da Vinci Code - Kanawha County Public Library

Later in 2006, Neal Wyatt wrote a column for the Library Journal series, "Redefining RA", entitled "Reading maps remake RA." This is pretty much core reading for anyone interested in mapping, and we took many of our tips in the poster session from this thoughtful and thorough overview of the concept.

Happy mapping!

A children's picture book creator talks about Caravaggio, Velázquez, Bacon and Eric Carle; The Book of Negroes gets mixed reviews

Two excellent articles in today's Guardian: the first is an interview with Oliver Jeffers, author of How to Catch a Star and Lost and Found. Joanna Carey finds him to be intense, which doesn't surprise me: his books are so simple and so well-crafted that it's evident he is a master at balancing the text and the art in the picture book format. Lost and Found was undeniably one of my favourite winter books for storytime last year.


The second fabulous Guardian article is a review of Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes by a senior lecturer at UEA, where my uncle teaches. Sarah Churchwell says Hill's book loses credibility, in part because of some of the unaddressed coincidences in the narrative that keep Aminata from coming to real, lasting harm throughout her turbulent life. Churchwell's right, especially when she remarks upon the particularly convenient coincidence at the end of the novel, where Aminata is reunited with someone she has lost many years ago. I agree with Churchwell, though, that readers are likely relieved at how Aminata emerges from many crises unbroken: I would add that it is a testament to the human spirit, and to the spirit of men and women who did survive the Middle Passage and build meaningful lives for themselves in Canada and the U.S. I also agree with Churchwell's high praise of Hill's writing: he is absolutely brilliant here, and this in part explains how I devoured the book in three evenings this week, when I really should have been doing other reading.

In related news, those of you attending the Ontario Library Association's Superconference next week may have noticed that Hill's book is the selection for One Book, One Conference (click here and read session 1201 - why can't OLA make internal links on each page of the Superconference schedule? I digress...). Some of you may also know that I've been asked to make a reading map for The Book of Negroes, which will be available at the conference. In fact, I'm folding the maps right now...